The Mediating Role Of Job Characteristics In The Relationship Between Total Quality Management And Job Satisfaction

Total Quality Management(Total Quality Management,hereinafter referred to as TQM)based on the institutional theory suggests that quality management is universally applicable.But in practice,the implementation effect of different enterprise quality management effect often shows great differences.The reason for these differences is in addition to the different factors of enterprises,and the deeper reason is that different attitude of employees on the implementation of quality management.When the employees are for it,the implementation of quality management will achieve good effect.On the contrary when employees are against the implementation of quality management enterprises,it will be difficult for enterprises to acquire good effect.Therefore,it's essential to clear the impact of TQM for employees' attitude when implementing.The existing research on the impact of TQM on employee attitudes has led to two direct opposite conclusions.One is that TQM has a positive impact on the work attitude of the staff.The other one has found that TQM had a negative impact on the employee's work attitude.Moreover,the existing literature focuses on the impact of TQM on employee attitudes,without further study of its influence mechanism.Based on the existing literatures,this paper chooses job satisfaction as the work attitude variable and adopts the quality management practices to measure TQM.Due to the two dimensions of TQM,the impact of different types of quality management practices on job satisfaction may be different.Therefore,this paper divides quality management practices into infrastructure quality management practices and core quality management practices.In order to explore the mechanism of TQM impact on job satisfaction,this paper introduces the job characteristics as the mediator variables and tests the mediating effect of the working characteristics by Bootstrap method.The results show that:(1)Infrastructure quality management practices has a significant positive impact on job satisfaction,while core quality management practices has a significant negative impact on job satisfaction.(2)Infrastructure quality management practices have a significant positive impact on job characteristics,while core quality management practices have a significant negative impact on job characteristics.(3)Job characteristics significantly affect job satisfaction.And the higher the level of job characteristics,the higher the level of job satisfaction.(4)Job characteristics plays a part of the mediating role in the relationships between infrastructure quality management practices,core quality management practices and job satisfaction,that is to say,TQM affect job satisfaction through job characteristics.This paper further examines the mediating role of the dimensions of the job characteristics in the relationship between infrastructure quality management practices,core quality management practices and job satisfaction.The results show that:(1)Skill Variety plays a part of the mediating role in the relationship between core quality management practices and job satisfaction.(2)Autonomy plays a part of the mediating role in the relationship between infrastructure quality management practices,core quality management practices and job satisfaction.(3)Feedback plays a part of the mediating role in the relationship between infrastructure quality management practices and job satisfaction.Based on the above conclusions,this paper puts forward the corresponding management measures on how to implement TQM more effectively.Finally,it points out the limitations of this paper and the future research direction.